Short-Term Traffic State Prediction Based on Mobile Edge Computing in V2X Communication

Real-time and reliable short-term traffic state prediction is one of the most critical technologies in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, the traffic state is generally perceived by single sensor in existing studies, which is difficult to satisfy the requirement of real-time prediction in complex traffic networks. In this paper, a short-term traffic prediction model based on complex neural network is proposed under the environment of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication systems. Firstly, a traffic perception system of multi-source sensors based on V2X communication is proposed and designed. A mobile edge computing (MEC)-assisted architecture is then introduced in a V2X network to facilitate perceptual and computational abilities of the system. Moreover, the graph convolutional network (GCN), the gated recurrent unit (GRU), and the soft-attention mechanism are combined to extract spatiotemporal features of traffic state and integrate them for future prediction. Finally, an intelligent roadside test platform is demonstrated for perception and computation of real-time traffic state. The comparison experiments show that the proposed method can significantly improve the prediction accuracy by comparing with the existing neural network models, which consider one of the spatiotemporal features. In particular, for comparison results of the traffic state prediction and the error value of root mean squared error (RMSE) is reduced by 39.53%, which is the greatest reduction in error occurrences by comparing with the GCN and GRU models in 5, 10, 15 and 30 min respectively.